Growth-promoting Bonuses and Mergers and Acquisitions Abstract Approximately one-third of U.S. top executives receive bonuses explicitly tied to firm size measures like sales growth. We study how such “growth-promoting bonuses” influence firms’ mergers and acquisitions (M&A) activities. We find that firms with such bonus structures are more prone to make Read more…

Are Banks Really Informed? Evidence From Their Private Credit Assessments Mehdi Beyhaghi, Cooper Howes, Gregory Weitzner Abstract In classic theories of financial intermediation, banks mitigate information frictions by monitoring and producing information about borrowers. However, it is difficult to test these theories without being able to observe banks’ private information. Read more…

Inflation and Disintermediation Abstract We test a bank credit channel through which unexpected increases in inflation lead to short-run macroeconomic fluctuations. For identification, we study an unexpected U.S. inflation increase in early 1977 and exploit differences in state-level reserve requirements for Federal Reserve nonmember banks, which create differences in banks’ Read more…